What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.